


Versus

by Vernal



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 13:50:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5458769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vernal/pseuds/Vernal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A whole lineage comes down to a barely-trained Sith and a not-yet Jedi, and yet it is the same fight: light versus dark. Winner take all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Versus

The saber is unwieldy in her hands and she stumbles among the trees with no sense of bearings or balance. Finn dying behind her, perhaps dead. She can hear the sputtering tones of Ren's saber in the background, the strange three-bladed thing, and somewhere in the back of her mind there is a foresense of pain, screaming, searing heat. She runs.

And Ren follows, fist to his side, staggering. Gone the honed finesse he remembers, the forms, the many small premonitions that had given him the upper hand in so many fights against so many others. Instead there is the fear and close to it, very near, the anger. He remembers words as they were passed to him, the link between fear, anger, suffering. Above all: _fear is the path to the dark side_. He remembers being near sleep, turning the words over in his head like a riverstone, smooth and whole. And then, as if he had cracked it open: _fear is the path to the dark side_. The anger and hatred would be his, but the suffering would be of his enemies, the ones who had mocked him, the ones—

He pounds on his side again. More blood. He staggers forward still, toward where the planet is crumbling. There is the faint sense of the traitor's ebbing life, the girl's fear.

And she does fear. For Finn, for the Resistance, for all the lives in the way of the First Order as it expands, as it surely will. For Leia, for Poe—even for BB-8, bless his tiny astromech heart. And for herself, especially when the cliff drops out in front of her and she skids to a stop in front of a sheer drop into yawning void.

Ren does not waste time. He comes forward and they fight, again, her blade a cool blue against his spitting, snapping red, trading blow for parry, he flourishing even through the pain, expressions huge and telling in the lurid light. Were she not fighting for her life she might start to get some sense of the man, but she is very, very focused on _not dying_ , and so she holds firm as she can against the increasingly wild swings, his maddening strength, until finally they come to an impasse at the edge of the cliff, blue against red, light against dark, one instance in a line of a great many.

They look at each other and many things pass between their eyes. Ren starts to speak, stops, speaks. _You need a teacher,_  he says. _I could show you the ways of the Force_ , and his voice is trembling, nearly cracks, and he feels so much a child again for a moment that he almost shuts the saber down and backs away.

But the shame cycles into fear, anger, hatred, and flush with the new strength of it he bears down again, chest wound burning, the Force itself bending to his will until his vision tunnels and he sees only the contact points of their sabers, pure white...

But she does not move. She holds ground even against his strength and though he does not notice she seems barely to be expending any effort at all, holding his grandfather's saber in a grip that is the purest of Form III, Soresu, holding firm against the dark.

She is considering the Force and in its way the Force considers her. It peers into her mind and takes stock of her limbs and flows through her the way it flows through all things, in and around and a part of, and when she looks up Ren looks back at her and the absolute calm is more frightening than anything he could ever conjure. She is a conduit for the Force and it looks through her and into him and when she presses forward he rears back and then the fight is on again, but he is _losing—_

He gives ground without thinking, the trees falling in the sunless dark. She presses him on the side where his wounds make him slow, draws a slash through his cloak, down between his eyes, and when she bats his lightsaber from his hand he is not even remotely surprised. _She's a natural,_ he thinks, looking up at her.

But there is a thread of anger in her, and as she looks down on him he can feel the Force slip from her limbs and from her head and it is she and her anger against him now, instead of all the Force. Even beaten and weaponless he smiles. It is something his master has taught him of, this subtle corruption.

He is about to invite her to strike, to end it, and so complete her transition to the dark, and then the planet opens up and parts them, and had his lips not been scarred together by the saber he would have screamed at the injustice of it, this interruption at the moment of his victory.

She watches him go. The anger leaves her by degrees as they pull apart, and he realizes that he is smaller, somehow, without the mask, shorter, younger. Just a boy.

She touches the power stud of the saber and walks away.


End file.
